Selected Writings by Marguerite de Navarre

In 1544, Princess Elizabeth of England (who would later become Elizabeth I) translated Marguerite’s poem into English prose and presented it to Katherine Parr, who was a devout Protestant.

Some scholars even think that Marguerite gave Anne the original manuscript of Miroir de l’âme pécheresse at some point before Anne’s execution in 1536. Anne Boleyn had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude (Marguerite’s sister-in-law) but a letter written by Anne Boleyn after she became queen of England suggests that she admired Marguerite and some have suggested that she may have become a follower of Marguerite and her affection for Marguerite may have influenced her own views about Christianity. It has been suggested that Marguerite and her Reformist poem had an influence on the English Reformation through Anne Boleyn. 2 It is a poetic monologue in which the speaker, a woman, explores and repairs her broken relationship with God. Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was, as Susan Synder wrote, ‘an outpouring (over 1400 lines) of self-accusation and self-abasement, recalling Paul and Augustine in its theological stance’.

Her grief is said to have inspired her to write her most controversial work, Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (1531), which was condemned by Sorbonne theologians as heresy for its Reformist ideas. She had two children during her second marriage: a daughter, the future Jeanne III of Narrave, and a son, Jean, who died just a few months after he was born. She had no children from her first marriage but she cared for her nieces Madeleine and Marguerite after the death of their mother, Queen Claude. Her first marriage, arranged when she was seventeen by decree of King Louis XII, was to Charles IV of Alençon and in 1526, just a year after the death of her first husband, Marguerite married Henry II of Navarre. Although best-known for writing the Heptaméron, Susan Snyder states that ‘she also wrote plays and poems on both secular and spiritual themes, and possibly a treatise in letters defending the worth and superiority’. She was also a writer, a patron of the arts, and an important figure in the French Renaissance and the French Reformation. Marguerite de Navarre (1492 – 1549) was the princess of France, Queen of Navarre, and Duchess of Alençon and Berry. In the final section of this post, I’ll be looking at the book in a slight more academic way, sharing some of the research that I’ve read. This review is not a typical review! Firstly, I’m going to write a little bit about Marguerite de Navarre before moving on to the Heptaméron itself.

Selected Writings by Marguerite de Navarre